


event horizon

by deadlybride



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dissociation, Gen, Memory Loss, Mild Horror, Season/Series 12, almost certainly not canon-compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 07:48:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7792996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadlybride/pseuds/deadlybride
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amara said, <i>you gave me what I needed most. I want to do the same for you.</i> Amara, who is defined as empty absence, recreated life. It goes as well as can be expected.</p>
            </blockquote>





	event horizon

**Author's Note:**

> For Alma, who said, "Amara really brought Mary back to life? That can't be right."

After the rescue, after blood and bruises and tears, the men who say they are her sons take Mary to a place they call the bunker.

It’s close to home, at least. North-central Kansas in autumn—she isn’t unfamiliar, but nevertheless it’s strange. Dean shows her into the lightless depths of it with a combination of pride and embarrassment. Trailing down the stairs behind them, Sam and Castiel are quiet.

“I know this isn’t—you said you didn’t want this for us,” Dean says. He’s standing at the steps that lead up into what looks like some kind of library. “But we did okay. Mom? We did okay.”

She has no doubt. She sets her palms on the glowing surface of what Dean calls the _war table_ , feels the hum of electricity in her bones. She’s sure they did just fine. What else can she think? She doesn’t know any different.

After a minute of silence, Castiel _(an angel, they told her—easy, distracted, tossing out the word like it wasn’t a miracle)_ clears his throat. “I should go. There’s still the matter of—“

“Cas,” Dean says. She doesn’t have to look up to know they’re exchanging a meaningful look. They’re keeping things from her, still. Like she’s too fragile to take everything at once.

There’s a pause. Castiel appears beside her and she tries not to flinch away. She was a bladed hunter for five years; she’s not afraid of power. She looks him directly in his blue, blue eyes. “Mary Winchester,” he says, in that mine-deep voice. “It has been a great honor.”

She lets him hold her hand between his cold, dry palms. Tries not to feel his searching look like a violation.

He leaves abruptly, after that. Dean says, “Sorry, he does that.”

She has to take Dean’s word for it. She has to take Dean at his word a lot, lately. Has to believe him when he says, _you know, we’ve met before_.

She doesn’t remember. He says, “Just before Samuel—I mean, before your dad died. I visited you. Do you remember?”

She remembers Dad’s mouth on hers, the slick of his tongue against her clenched teeth. The blood still seeping out of his stomach under her hands. She doesn’t remember a green-eyed stranger, and why should she. Her parents were dead and John was dead—but then he wasn’t. That’s more than enough for anyone to have to deal with, she thinks.

“Mom?”

They’re sitting in the library, around one of the lovely mahogany tables. The room is full of amber light. Sam and Dean sit across from her, staring at her. They’re always staring. Like she’s going to disappear if they blink.

Dean says, “Mom?”

She shakes her head. She smiles at—at _Dean_. Right. This is her boy, and his little (or not-so-little) brother beside him. They’re watching her, faces open, yearning for… something. She doubts that she has whatever they’re looking for, but she’ll do her best.

When they were in John’s car, Dean told her that it was the year 2016. That he turned thirty-seven this year. He’s older than she was when she died _(when the man with the yellow eyes tore open her stomach, plastered her to the ceiling so she could watch, her baby’s eyes wide and fixed on her as the flames started)_. How strange it is, that he’s so old.

Dean leads her down the white-lit hallways, past door after door. It’s like a maze. Dean tells her, “I’ll put you in my bed for now, okay? We’ll get something better set up for you, but, uh, these Letters geeks didn’t exactly have great guest rooms in mind when they excavated.”

He opens a door that looks just like all the others, gestures grandly for her to precede him. “My room,” he says, behind her, and she stands in the middle of it, stares around. He’s saying something, something about—records, or something, but she’s confused. This can’t be Dean’s room. The bed's far too big. There are guns and knives and swords on the walls. There is no trainset. There are no little plastic cars. She sits on the edge of the mattress and it sinks mysteriously underneath her weight. "Comfy, right?" Dean says, smiling encouragingly, and so she smiles back. She misses the hard resistance of springs. She feels untethered.

He leaves her there, says she should rest if she wants. He’s going to make her eggs. Her baby, her little golden-haired rowdy angel, is going to make her eggs. She feels like she could vomit, and tries to steady herself. She takes long, deep breaths of the still, dust-scented air. She can handle this.

 

 

Dean wants to know about her family. He knew her dad, though the explanation of how is strange. He wants to know about her mom, the woman she named him for.

“She seemed like a—well, she was a real nice lady,” Dean says. “When I met her, I mean.”

Her mother was a hunter. She knows this, but she doesn’t feel it. Doesn’t feel the hollow space in her chest that she remembers, from before, when she would think about how her mother was dead—how she’d never hold her grandchildren. When she tries to think back, now, it’s a dark haze. There’s a sense of... long, dark hair. A black dress, billowing silken in an unfelt wind. Too-sharp bones in a too-sharp face. Bliss.

“She was strong,” she says. That feels right. “Stronger than anyone.” Yes.

Dean’s mouth turns up at one corner. “I bet she was,” he says.

 

 

Sam brings her a box. Wooden, old. “We—um, we got this from the house. From the old house, I mean.”

He and Dean show her pictures. John. Some stranger with a ball cap. Two boys. She has to trust that the men showing her the pictures are the boys from the photographs. The faces change too much, leaps of distance between each shot. Without the knowledge of the intervening time how is she meant to know that her baby turned into this sloe-eyed little boy, into this solemn teen, into this huge, careful stranger?

“We, um. We moved around a lot,” Sam says. Dean gives him a side-long look, but doesn’t elaborate.

There are newer pictures, less foxed around the edges. Sam points out the people in them. A red-headed girl. A Vietnamese boy. A black man who looks furious that his picture is being taken. A dark-haired older woman with a blonde girl tucked under her arm, both smiling broadly at the camera. Sam tells careful versions of their stories, Dean chiming in occasionally, but she understands without needing to be told that they’re all dead. Sam keeps them alive in this box. A coffin of memories, held underground in a bunker. It makes sense. If they aren’t burned, safely turned to ash and smoke, then the dead should be buried.

 

 

The bed is too soft. It molds strangely around her body, holds the heat of her unnaturally. She blinks up into the grey dark. Dean showed her the record player, offered his selection of vinyl with a kind of pride. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that she’d never had much of a taste for Led Zeppelin. That was John’s music. She isn’t going to listen to it while he’s gone.

She lays there, in the quiet. She listens to the dry air rushing through her nostrils. Imagines it filling her lungs, imagines the creak as her ribs expand. If she closes her eyes she can hear the thump of her heartbeat, pumping blood through her veins. Her lips part, unseaming stickily. The air rasps into her throat.

It’s cold down here. She’d pull the blankets up, but they make her feel… claustrophobic. Under tons of concrete and earth, no windows—it’s bad enough without adding another layer. A wave of goosebumps rills over her bare arms, spreading up her belly and her breasts, her hair standing on end. The impulse to shiver shudders under her skin. She remains still. She blinks up at the ceiling. She hasn’t slept. Doesn’t know how long it’s been, but if she closes her eyes all she sees is the dark. She needs to stay here, with her boys. They need her. It’s dark down here, and they’ll be afraid when they wake up.

 

 

She doesn’t remember anything about being dead. When she thinks about it, when she tries to remember, her mind returns an endless vastness of empty dark space. Absence. She may as well try to visualize where she was before she was born. In a way, she thinks, it’s the same space. A liminal blackness. A transition between is not and is.

She remembers dying. The blood. The yellow-eyed man. Her baby, Dean’s little brother, defenseless in the crib below her. She remembers the flames starting, at first under her skin and then boiling outward, the way the oxygen burned away in her lungs. John taking the baby away. Then, the last moment, before the ceiling collapsed: a dark figure, a sharp and lovely face tipped up to hers. A wide smile, gleaming in the firelight.

She doesn’t remember what was said. She doesn’t remember what happened after. There was darkness.

 

 

“Mom?”

She’s rolling out crust on the countertop in the kitchen. She hums.

“Mom, it’s like… three in the morning. Are you okay?”

Dean likes pie, she remembers. Perfect, fragile Dean, clinging to her leg and grinning, coy, saying _can I have some, Mommy?_ Not yet, she thinks. Not until it’s done.

John gets songs stuck in his head, all the time. _It’s always the same line!_ he says, and when she’s unsympathetic he sings it at her until she starts throwing things at him to get him to stop. She doesn’t get that, so much. Usually it’ll be a random sentence, from a book, or a movie, or a tv show. It niggles in her head, lingering until she can hear it again, for real, and exorcise it. _I want to do the same for you_. She keeps hearing it. Can’t place the voice, but it’s familiar. Makes her think of—

A big hand lands on her shoulder. “Mom.”

She jumps, drops the rolling pin. When she turns there’s a man standing behind her, hands upraised.

“Sorry, sorry,” he’s saying, eyes wide. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

She breathes.

“Mom?”

 _Mom_. That’s her name. It identifies her. Not person, but object—a function, a stepping-stone at the end of generations. The end of a path through time. It leads to two sons.

“Can you hear me? Mom.” This from the tall, tender-eyed stranger, so careful with the way he speaks. He reaches out a big, long-fingered hand, curls it hesitantly around her shoulder. She looks down at his hand, tanned-dark against her white nightgown. She looks back up at him. He’s frowning. “Mom, it’s Sam.”

Sam. Sammy. Eight pounds, two ounces. Born at 3:02 a.m. The clock on the wall behind him reads 3:03. Dean’s had a little brother for a whole minute. She smiles, doesn’t mind the tears filling her eyes. Her baby. Sam.

“Sam,” she breathes, and gets up on her tiptoes to pull him into a hug. Her hand curls around the back of his neck, under the silken fall of his hair. “Darling. I’m so glad to see you.”

He shudders. Wraps careful arms around her back. She wonders if he likes pie. She’s making one for Dean, but she’s sure he’ll share. He’s a good boy.

 

 

The boys are in the library, seated at one of the tables with their heads together. They’re talking about something, quiet. She doesn’t mind. It’s good that they’re friends. Good that they’re close. She always hoped for a close-knit family. She knows that she was an ‘accident,’ as they used to say _(do they still say that? does anyone have anything they don’t want in this strange new age?)_ —still, her parents were close, knotted steel, keeping her close in the cradle of their arms. When she made a family she’d always hoped it would be as tight-knit as the one she grew up in. There’s nothing more important than family. Nothing can come before that.

She’s sitting at the war table. The map of the world is lit from within. There are so many places, she thinks. Places she’ll never go. John has been to a lot more, but he doesn’t like to talk about that. She doesn’t blame him. She doesn’t like to talk about the stink when a body gets burned, the way it makes her hungry and repulsed at the same time. She doesn’t talk about the way her dad’s mouth tasted. He thinks she’s overreacting whenever they get a rotten egg and she throws up in the sink. For a while, she could blame it on morning sickness.

“Hey, Mom?”

She blinks. When she looks up, Dean is standing there. He’s taller than she expects. “Yes, sweetheart?” she says, after a few seconds.

Dean pauses, looks down, but not before she can catch the little smile that pulls at his mouth. So sweet, she thinks. Her little honey boy.

“Dean.” That’s—that’s Sam, standing behind him, arms folded in tight over his chest. He looks wretched.

Dean’s still looking down, but his smile’s gone. He nods, just a tiny movement, but he doesn’t say anything.

That little snatch of a sentence floats through her head. _I want to do the same for you_. She wishes she could remember what it’s from. It’s driving her crazy.

Sam comes up beside his brother, apparently tired of waiting. Impatient, she thinks. Just like his father. “Mom, we were wondering, um. What do you remember?”

“What do you mean?” she says.

Dean rubs a hand over the back of his neck. He shares a glance with Sam. “From, uh. Like, before. Before I found you, in the woods. Do you remember anything?”

Learning how to strip and clean a shotgun. Losing her virginity in a tight pinch of awkward pain on her wedding night. The slick, bloody triumph of the last push, followed by the scream of an infant in a sunny maternity ward. Tapping a sconce in a dim hallway, sleepily watching the flickering light. Darkness.

“Fog, maybe?” That’s Sam, again. Dean’s got his hands propped on the back of a chair, looking like it’s holding all his weight. Sam, watching her, shrugs. He spreads his empty hands in the air. “A dark smoke? Anything?”

A dark smoke. She raises her eyebrows. “Really? I’m not a civilian. I’ve seen more than my share of demons, boys. You know that better than anyone.”

Sam flinches, for some reason. Dean stands up straight as Sam steps back, away. Like counterweights, she thinks. Push and pull. That’s good. Everything needs balance.

Dean clears his throat. “We know, Mom. It’s just—there’s been a lot of weird stuff, in the past couple of years. A lot weirder than just demons. We’re just… trying to figure out what’s going on.”

Just like hunters. Or Men of Letters, maybe, if that’s what they are now. She smiles at him. “I understand, sweetheart.”

“Yeah?” he says. He looks—hopeful, almost.

She stands, cups his cheek in her hand. His eyelids flutter. Behind him, Sam’s expression is tight, uncertain. “Yeah,” she says. “But your father will be home, soon. Let’s not bother him with this stuff, okay?”

 

 

She’s in the kitchen, rolling out a crust. It’s crumbly, hard to work with. She should’ve added more butter.

Earlier, she stood in one of the long white hallways, her back up against the wall, and listened to the boys talk.

 _Dude, there’s no way. / I don’t know, Dean. I just—something’s wrong. She’s getting worse. / Sam— / I don’t like it either! But you have to consider the possibility. / What? She’s our_ mom _, Sam. / And I’m your brother, and it happened to me. What’s your point? It’s not like souls just… automatically come along for the ride. We know that. / ...It just doesn’t make sense. She’s not… going nuts, she’s not killing people, or breaking shit or—or whatever! I don’t know! But it’s not the same. / I know. I know, believe me. But something’s… just not right. We have to ask Cas. We have to be sure. Who knows what Amara did?_

She sprinkles a few drops of ice water over the rolled-out crust. Pats it flat. She hums.

While the boys are sleeping, she walks through the halls. She peers into the rooms. Storage, garage, shooting range. Empty room after empty room. It’s a warren, under here. A body could get lost. She watches Sam sleep in his bare little room. She watches Dean sleep in a narrow cot, tucked in among file boxes and dust. She trails her fingers along spell-worked iron cuffs. She looks at a stain on the concrete floor—blood, she thinks. The lights flicker in the hallways when she drifts by. She wears her nightgown, though she’s never quite sure when it’s night. May as well be night all the time. She doesn’t know when she last saw the sun.

Before she died, she thinks that would have bothered her more. She would have pushed her way out of this place, would have felt starved without the ability to lift her face to the light.

She doesn’t need it, now. She doesn’t need to sleep. She’s alert, and here, and ready to protect and watch over Dean. Dean and Sam. Stronger than she was when she allowed a yellow-eyed man to tear open her stomach and infect her baby and set the gears in motion for an apocalypse. She was a good hunter, once upon a time. She can be better.

She sits at the table in the kitchen. It’s cold. She rubs her hands together. It’s so quiet that the rasp of her palms, skin on dry skin, is loud. She should get up. She should cook something. The boys will be awake in a few hours. They’ll be hungry.

That sentence is running around and around in her head. _I want to do the same for you_. She can almost see the shape of the mouth that says it. When she closes her eyes, it’s dark.

 

 

She’s carving thin slices off the ham, making sandwiches. She likes this kitchen. It’s not precisely cheerful, but it’s very clean, and the knives are very sharp.

“Mom?”

“Hi, sweetheart,” she says, glancing up, and—like it does every time—Dean’s face relaxes into a smile, brief though it is. She smiles back. Goes back to slicing.

“You don’t need to be cooking for us all the time, you know,” he says, after a few seconds. “You should rest. I feel like you’re always on your feet.”

“Don’t be silly.” She spreads mayonnaise evenly over the slices of bread she’s laid out. Dean likes his sandwiches a particular way. She knows this. “I’m here to take care of my boys. This is nothing.”

Ham, cheese. Pickle. Dean takes a deep breath, lets it out. “It’s not nothing,” he says, quietly.

She sets him up at the table with a plate, starts washing the dishes.

“Since you’re here, honey, I wanted to talk to you about something.” The water’s very hot. She sinks her hands into it and feels sterilized. “I know you and Sam have been worried about me.”

There’s a little thump, from behind her. “It’s not—“

“It’s okay,” she says, shrugging. “You’re hunters. Dead start walking, you get a little concerned. I understand.”

She rinses the knife. Watches the hot water stream off of it. Dean’s quiet. She turns around, drying her hands, and he’s sitting very still at the table, a sandwich half-eaten in front of him.

“I heard Sam talking to your friend Castiel on the phone, earlier,” she says. Dean flinches. “I just don’t think it’s necessary. I wouldn’t want to distract him, or you.”

Dean shifts. He looks down at the table. Frowns. “Mom—“

“I just don’t see what an angel could possibly do,” she says. She folds her hands in front of her. Her skin feels hot. The lights in here are flickering, for some reason. Bad wiring, maybe. “I feel fine. I’m just here to help you, baby.”

Dean’s not smiling, now. “I know you are,” he says. He shifts again. His eyes are wide. “Mom—are you doing this?”

“Doing what, honey,” she says. “You haven’t finished your sandwich.”

He lays his hands flat on the table, takes a deep breath. His eyes are so lovely, she thinks. Wide and green and long-lashed. Like hers.

“Sam was on the phone for a long time,” she says. “I just don’t know what he could have been talking to Castiel about.”

“Mom,” Dean says. He swallows. “Mom, I can’t move. I want to stand up.”

“I just don’t know,” she says, shaking her head. Dean is staring at her. “Sweetheart, you haven’t finished your lunch.”

He needs to eat. His cheekbones are sharp in his face, his jaw a hard clean line. He looks like her mother. Whatever happened to her soft, tender little boy. “You need to eat, baby,” she says, and Dean’s hand moves, it jerks toward the sandwich and lifts it to his mouth. He takes a bite. Chews. His eyes close, squeeze shut tight, like it’s good.

Good, she thinks, and turns back to the sink. She knows how to take care of her boys. She’s strong. Like her mother. She’ll do what’s best for them; give them what they need most. _I wanted to do the same for you_. It’s a mother’s prerogative.

 

 

Castiel finds her in the kitchen.

She’s holding a cup of coffee between her palms, sitting at the table. From here she can see every entrance. Dean is sleeping on the cot in the little storeroom. Sam is sleeping on his hard bed. She knows that they’re sleeping, because she wanted them to be. They’re good boys. The pies are in the oven. They’re going to be very good.

Castiel sits across from her. He folds his hands on the table in mimicry of hers. They look at each other.

“I didn’t detect that anything was amiss when we saved Sam,” he says, eventually.

“That’s because nothing is wrong,” she says. She smiles. “My boys are just being nervous over nothing.”

Castiel frowns. “Your boys are many things, but needlessly paranoid is not one of them.”

He looks her up and down. His eyes are very blue—piercing, she thinks. It’s an encroachment. Goosebumps ripple under the intrusive fingers of his power over her skin. That’s not… this isn’t meant to happen. She feels almost dizzy. The lights in here are very bright.

“Sam thinks you were brought back without your soul,” he says, after a moment. “He wanted me to examine you. I would prefer to do so with your permission.” She blinks at him, and he shrugs. “Dean wouldn’t thank me for causing pain to his mother unnecessarily, but I’ll do what it takes to keep them safe. It’s the least I can do, after everything.”

Keeping them safe. That’s what they need—to be safe, and to be happy. She knows this, deep, at the foundations of her. Her impulses conflict, for a moment, until she says, “Okay.” She hears her own voice as from a distance. “Examine me.”

He offers her a wooden spoon to bite on. She does so, puzzled. He rolls up the sleeve of his trenchcoat, fastidiously, and then she watches as his fingers sink into her belly. Right about where the yellow-eyed man ripped open her womb, she thinks.

The lights in the kitchen dim. One bulb pops in a shower of sparks. The touch of light inside her burns, grace flickering bright at the corners of her eyes, but it doesn’t hurt. Castiel is staring at her, his hand wrist-deep in her stomach.

She drops the spoon. “Is everything okay?” she says. There’s a singing in her ears, a high ringing keen.

Castiel is sweating. At his wrist, the swirl of blinding light is dimming, a black liquid pulse of not-light reaching up, threading through the bright and pushing it back. She meets his eyes. The black ripples, an emptiness made solid, its edges pushing forward and yawning. A space where light could disappear. Castiel heaves a deep breath, and snatches his hand back. The hole in her takes a moment to close.

“So,” she says. He stumbles back from the table, fetches up hard with his back against the island. “What’s the verdict?”

She stands up and he flings out a hand, grace gathering in his palm and behind his eyes. “You are not—you are not one of my Father’s creations,” he says. His voice vibrates through the metal and stone, resonating oddly with the singing in her ears.

She frowns, and opens her mouth, but before she can say anything the light gathering in him bursts forth, pulsing into her in a hard electric shock. It hurts like burning did—all-consuming, deep inside where she should be strong. Something crashes to the floor, and shatters. She squeezes her eyes closed, even as she’s lit up with pain, reaches down for the empty and thinks, _I am the creation of my mother_ , and then—

 

 

“Mom?”

She opens her eyes. The light hurts them and she blinks, puts a hand up in front of her face.

Two men are standing there, staring at her. “What are you doing?” one says.

He has green eyes. They’re lovely. She says, “I’m making a pie.”

The taller one puts a hand over his mouth. Says, through his fingers, “Mom, you’re bleeding.”

She looks. Her palm, her left palm, is bisected with red. She doesn’t remember how that happened—but then, yes. She knows. She had to draw a picture. So that, when a blue-eyed man appeared bloody and smoking in the doorway, when he tried to race down the hallways to get help, she could press her red palm to the red picture and he would be gone. He needed to be gone. She doesn’t remember why that was important.

The boy with the green eyes is wrapping her palm in white cloth. His eyes are wet. She knows she should feel sorry for that, that her chest should be aching, but it isn’t. It isn’t, and she doesn’t know why.

“I want to do the same for you,” she says. The green-eyed boy startles, his hands jerking away from hers. It’s dark in here, but she can see that he’s frightened. “I keep thinking that. That I want—I want to do the same for you. I don’t know where that comes from.”

The tall one is backed up against the shelves by the doorway. His eyes are wide. She smiles at him, tries to be reassuring. “I keep thinking it. All the time. But I can’t remember where I heard it.”

The room is full of shattered glass, half-melted metal, spill and ruin and smoke. Her skin feels hot, burnt.

The dressing on her hand is only half-done. She winds it, slowly, around her palm. Watches the red seep through the white cloth. “I wanted you to be happy,” she says. “That’s all I wanted. To give you what you needed most.”

The lights are flickering. She remembers: a dark hallway. Late at night. She was tired. The sconce flickered and she tapped at the glass. She wasn’t thinking.

“Mom?”

She doesn’t know which one said it. They’re standing together, now. Two tall boys, shoulder to shoulder. They don’t look very much alike, except for their matching expressions. It’s very dark. Her hand hurts.

“I made a pie,” she says.

She wishes her mother were here. She imagines, for a second—a wide smile, dark knowing eyes. A billowing, rising fog, thick enough to choke a person.

“I made a pie,” she says. The boys are breathing hard, their faces wet. Her vision blurs. “I think it might be burning.”

She closes her eyes and feels the yawning nothing down inside her, the empty absent dark.

 _Mom_ , she hears.

A boy is kneeling in front of her. His hands are tight on hers. His eyes are damp. Green. Like hers, she thinks. “My little angel,” she says, distant. The taller boy is holding a gleaming blade. It glints silver in the flickering light.

She breathes out. The light is extinguished and it’s dark. She hurts. There are cursing voices, a clatter of metal on metal, hands jostling her. She wants them to go away.

It’s quiet, now. Dark. She breathes in. It smells like smoke.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The idea of an Amara-born Mary creeps me out. Hence: my first attempt at horror (mild though it may be). I'd appreciate your thoughts, if you have any.


End file.
